Sourcing! The best/worst part of doing anything big in your home. I'm in a constant state of flux when it comes to decision making. AND deciding what to splurge on. Is splurging made up by the home reno industry to convince consumers to spend billions of dollars on things you can't afford, yet 500% cannot live without? Probably. If I splurge on it and then hate it- what kind of return policy am I looking at? Is whatever I found online available locally so I can go see it in person? No? Does the post office let you sleep there?

These are the thoughts that run through my head...it gets a little hairy in there.

ANYWAY. After looking at my inspiration, I landed on a few themes.

White Cabinets

Gold Hardware

Bright + Fresh Exciting

The cabinets we ended up getting at Home Depot. We chose the Martha Stewart Maidstone line in 'Picket Fence'. Choosing the cabinets were the easy part. Once we did that..

Countertops

I wanted Carrera Marble countertops. As that is completely impractical in a kitchen setting, we were looking for something that would be similar to that but extremely durable. We were really surprised to find out that Quartz could get us the effect we were looking for.

I went and visited the quartz manufacturer in person to check out a few patterns we'd seen in Home Depot. Our three contestants are below:

I felt like goldilocks walking through the facility with the floor manager. He had a man operating a forklift pick up the huge slabs of countertop and turn them around so I could see the movement in the slabs. It seemed like so much effort on their end for me to look at them for less than 2 minutes. Ultimate customer service experience. We ended up choosing the one on the far right- 'White Arabesque'.

Pulls + Knobs

Whew what a search. I think I clocked a solid 40 hours looking for our pulls and knobs. I fell head over heels for Schoolhouse Electric's hardware line. YUMM.

These, however, were so laughably out of my price range I couldn't even consider them. I needed 18 pulls and 32 knobs. I would have to take out a second mortgage on my house to pull these babies off. Alas, they followed me around the internet throughout my ENTIRE 40 hours of searching, just tormenting me. Or inspiring me if we need to spin it that way.

Moving along, these were my finalists:

Knobs

We ended up ordering the Laurey knobs (top left). In April. By mid August, when they still hadn't arrived I ended up canceling the order. I was in constant communication with a very nice woman in customer service but 4 months with no end in sight was too much for this gal. I resumed my search, so sad that Laurey wouldn't be coming to live with us. We could have used some french flair.

The above is LITERALLY all that I found that were, what I deemed, moderately affordable. COME ON HOME DEPOT- please figure out that brass is back.

Either way, our final decisions were to go with Lew's pulls and knobs. Lucky for us, the Lew's knob was released between April and August so in my second round of searching, I was able to find them. Fate right?

The biggest reason we went with the Lew's pulls is because they come in multiple sizes. Things you never think about with kitchens: do you change the size of the pulls based off of the size of the drawer front? The more I thought about it, the more I thought I had to have multiple sizes. We have cabinet drawer fronts ranging from 12 inches to 36 inches. One bar size couldn't fit all of that surely. In the end, I bought 5 different sizes of pulls. I think they ended up looking balanced and it will probably be something not a single other human notices. For some things though, that's the goal right?